with the world’s poor. On the face of it, the idea of rock star Bob Geldof,
lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, meeting with Mother Teresa not only
seemed odd; it was completely incongruous. But the two actually had
something in common: working to help the poor.
Geldof, an Irish Catholic who had little use for the Church of his
youth, had come to the forefront during 1984 for his concert Band Aid to
raise money for the poor in Africa. In 1985, he was traveling to Ethiopia
to help distribute the funds raised. He met Mother Teresa at the Addis
Ababa airport in January 1985. Geldof remembered, upon greeting her,
how tiny she was. He towered more than two feet above her. He de-
scribed her as a battered, wizened woman whose most striking character-
istic was her feet. Mother Teresa’s sandals were beaten up pieces of
leather; her feet were gnarled and misshapen. When Geldof tried to kiss
her, Mother Teresa bowed her head quickly so that he could only kiss the
top of her wimple. This bothered Geldof a great deal. He later found out
that she only let lepers kiss her.
As photographers snapped their picture, Mother Teresa and Geldof
began talking, she about the Missionaries of Charity, he about his band,
the Boomtown Rats. He even offered to arrange a benefit concert for her
work. But she gently refused him, stating that God would provide for her.
As Geldof later recounted, he had an opportunity to see Providence in
action. Upon arriving in the city, Mother Teresa had seen some vacant
buildings and asked if she could have the buildings to use as orphanages.
Flummoxed government officials, not wanting to turn her down, clearly
did not know what to do. But it was clear that Mother Teresa knew about
the buildings beforehand. When the official told her he would find her a
building for her orphanages, she reminded him that she needed two
buildings for two orphanages, not one.
When asked later for his impression of Mother Teresa, Geldof replied
that she was the embodiment of moral good, but also added that there was
nothing otherworldly about her. She showed herself fully capable of han-
dling the media and could manipulate them easily. He also found her de-
void of any false modesty or pretense; she was totally selfless in her work
and seemed genuinely to care about the people she was helping.
In 1986, Mother Teresa made further headlines when she traveled to
the Soviet Union to meet with government officials. Two years later, she
returned with four nuns to begin working in a Moscow hospital helping
victims of an earthquake. Her visit was unprecedented and marked the
first time that a religious mission was allowed to open a house since the
Russian Revolution in 1917.
120 MOTHER TERESA